


Taking Note

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Minor Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6787261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve hadn’t gotten any less stupid after seventy years, Bucky knew, but he had gotten awfully attached to making lists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking Note

**Author's Note:**

> Written post-TWS, pre-Civil War, so probably doesn't fit any new timeline at all.

They were in the supermarket, when Bucky saw the list. They were in the supermarket because Steve had lots of weird ideas about Bucky’s recovery, and apparently one of them was, “Terrify your best friend by dragging him into an unnecessarily large warehouse filled with foodstuffs and a vast assortment of blockages in the form of rolling carts and ill-behaved children, then abandon him with a poorly written ration list in an aisle that seems solely devoted to inedible cleaning products.”

Because seventy years on ice had not improved Steve’s handwriting at all. He still wrote like it was March in Brooklyn, too doggone cold to bend your fingers, and too late in the season to have any coal left to heat their room.

Actually, Steve’s list for Bucky’s recovery was pinned to the refrigerator, and said innocuous things like, “Go outside once a day” and “Learn to navigate basic errands,” but Bucky had known Steve’s way with euphemisms since long before their first war reports. “Outside” meant “into an unprotected area filled with potential targets, often with a disproportionate number of impolite children who wanted to touch his arm,” and “basic errands” stood for “somehow find the bread with the seeds that Steve likes from what appears to be a wall built of loaves.” Of course, “Ma, we’ll be right back,” had existed decades before, code for, “Ma, I’m gonna go pick a fight while Bucky tries to haul me out by my shirt collar, because I’m too stupid to keep my yap shut.”

Steve hadn’t gotten any less stupid, Bucky knew, but he had gotten awfully attached to making lists. Lists about how Bucky slept – or when he stopped and started screaming – about suggestions from their therapists. Lists of things they should do, lists of the places they’d visited on what Steve called “their road trip” and what Sam more accurately described as, “the wild goose chase we went on to find you, Sergeant, and then the godawful trip across the country while we waited for you to slit our throats.” Lists of their new favorite foods and restaurants they hadn’t tried, lists of books people recommended – as if either Steve  _ or  _ Bucky had spent the ‘30s reading Shakespeare and not trying to eke out a living.

So the grocery list that Steve had shoved at Bucky before taking off for the butcher’s counter wasn’t a surprise.  _ Yogurt – sam says blue strawberry. Fruit – not bananas buck likes oranges. Pizza is in frozen aisle, not bakery. tony’s brand powder protein gross, don’t buy.  _ It was that Bucky had dropped the battered notebook dodging a sticky child fleeing its mother with a bag of candy, and when he picked it up there was a different list entirely, in two uneven columns down the page.

_ Earned bond money. Proved Erskine right. no, already with schmidt. Saved guys in Italy. Saved Bucky. (once) Helped stop schmidt. saved brooklyn. maybe. maybe if different test candidate, schmidt stopped earlier. Helped fight aliens.  _ _ tried _ _ destroy hydra (again). was in future to find buck. _

_ got Erskine killed. chorus girl, not home to get bucky’s letters and know where was. got buck captured (wouldve been dead. we’d bothve been dead, w/o serum. maybe dead better than what I left him to). couldn’t die. didn’t stop hydra. (didnt really save buck atall) _

Bucky found Steve next to a colorful array of fruit, knocking on a melon. Steve glanced up just as Bucky reached him, and so had time to set the melon down before Bucky shoved him hard, the notebook still clenched in his left hand.

“You fucking idiot!” he growled, and shoved Steve again, past a startled woman with frizzy hair and into a stand of apples. The apples and Steve landed on the floor, a boneheaded blond amidst a rolling array of red and green.

“Is this about the pine nuts?” Steve asked, scooting away from Bucky’s scowl. “I know they sound weird, but Clint has this recipe that tastes amazing, Buck, and I -” He trailed off when Bucky hauled him back to his feet by his collar, hand twisted in Steve’s shirt so tightly they could both feel his pulse. “It’s not about the pine nuts, is it?”

“Zola wouldn’t have  _ killed  _ me, you numbskull. He didn’t the second time, did he?”

“Zola?” Steve frowned. “Buck, did something trigger this? Did you have a flashb-” Bucky threw the notebook at Steve’s head. “Oh,” Steve exhaled, because of course he’d caught it easily, even short of breath and on his tiptoes surrounded by fallen fruit. The serum had done that for him, too.

“ _ Oh _ ,” Bucky mimicked, snarling. “You would’ve been dead by V-Day,” he snapped, ignoring the fact that they both  _ had  _ been, more or less. “You remember what all the damn doctors said, when your Ma asked. And Jim and Monty and Dum Dum, Jackie and Gabe would all ’ve been shot for disobedience, or worked to death.”

“Anyone could have -”

“Not anyone. Not no one, punk. Nobody but you.” Bucky’s hand was shaking. He let go of Steve’s shirt, and stiffened when Steve didn’t even pause to inhale before wrapping both warm hands around Bucky’s numb fingers. “You think they could have given that serum to anyone else and gotten anything but the Skull all over again?”

“Sure,” Steve said, with that stupid half-smile, like Bucky hadn’t just broken the supermarket and probably made tomorrow’s papers. “They gave it to you, didn’t they?”

Bucky still doubted that, but Steve had a list of their abilities and insisted it was all the same. “Fine,” he mumbled, and allowed Steve to step forward and wrap his arms around them, pinning Bucky’s hands between their chests. “But they did that anyway. If you hadn’t gotten the serum, you’d’ve just been dead and I still woulda been … I still -”

“Shh,” Steve whispered, and kissed the air above Bucky’s head when Bucky buried his face in Steve’s neck and breathed. “I’m sorry, Buck. It was a stupid list, you’re right. But you have all these nightmares, and I keep thinking, if I hadn’t brought you on that train. If I hadn’t been Captain America at all, then maybe…”

Bucky shook his head, and was grateful to all the times Steve had made him go outside that allowed him to disregard all the people staring at them and kicking a path through the apples to take pictures on their phones. “I can’t do this without you, Steve,” he insisted, because the only thing Bucky had ever done without Steve was go to war. “I couldn’t do any of this.” He took a deep breath, and lifted his head, glowering at a kid filming them a few feet away. “Especially not the goddamn shopping,” he added, because Steve had that look he got sometimes right before acting like a sap, and Bucky knew enough about this century to know that they didn’t want a video of Captain America kissing the world’s most feared assassin on the news.

Steve chuckled, but slung his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and didn’t lean in to steal a kiss. “What do you say we skip the shopping today, and order in? Maybe rework some of my lists?”

“I’ll be the only one making lists from now on,” Bucky retorted, and Steve didn’t complain when the entire notebook went into the fireplace later that night, while they tangled together on the couch and the pizza sat half-eaten on the coffee table.

Bucky did make a list, eventually, to replace all the ones he’d burned.

_ you wake me up before I start screaming. you don’t complain when I squeeze the glasses too hard and they break. you smile like a little shit (that was the first thing I remembered). you kiss me good morning, even though you have terrible breath. you kiss me goodnight. you hold onto me (so I must be real). you make me want to stay (it’s not the serum that keeps me alive, punk. it never was) _


End file.
